Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
Title: Re-Entering Storybrooke
Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon A Time. If I did, Adam & Eddy would have been fired early in Season 2 and picking up litter by the side of the highway.
Additional Disclaimer: Shamelessly borrowed stuff from Avengers: Infinity War which belongs to Marvel and sadly also to Disney. South Park was right. Disney is evil!
Summary: One-shot that follows the series finale and attempts to tie it back into my WIP "The Outstanding Balance of Morality (revised edition)" as a prologue. Do not read if you are a fan of canon and if you plan to but haven't read TOBoM as it contains MAJOR spoilers. (rated M for language)
Genre: Family/Tragedy
Re-Entering Storybrooke
Everyone from all the realms that could fit into the quasi-chapel of the dethroned King George's ancestors adorned with flying buttresses and rainbow colored stained glass windows basked in the perfect ending that was the unanimous vote - and by vote, executive decision made by Snow White - to appoint Regina Mills the "Good Queen" to rule over all the realms... with the presumption that she would be as beloved and accepted by all in the same way the British Parliament of the Land Without Magic were certain their beneficence and good intentions at declaring Victoria the Good Queen of millions of people in far off lands who'd either never heard of her or only suffered under her government's cruel actions would weep with joy to be her subjects.
But the Books with golden bindings were never written by those people, the ones that Regina had already decided would absolutely want to all be sucked out of their dozens of realms and transplanted into a dingy, backwater little town in Maine in a world where they were isolated to a few square miles and dial-up Internet access... because they would never have to be separated then from... who exactly? And then later could be shoved en-masse through the portals created by Anton's mutant strain of magic beans to bare witness to Regina's coronation as attendance was mandatory.
In other words... what the fuck!?
Up until this surprise event to an outside observer it had seemed that Snow White's reckless stupidity and Regina's logic and pragmatism had been swapped in a Freaky Friday type situation during the battle to defeat Wish Rumple and... whatever it was that was needed to happen after that. Or maybe not. That "for the good of all" thinking that really wasn't for the good of anyone but her own family was Snow White's deal so it was it was foolish to think her motives then had gone beyond that even if the uncrowned Queen-turned-school teacher had gained a completely out-of-character forthrightness complete with a swooning-and-giggles-free articulation that even surpassed her bandit period's persona and would have made her a great leader if not for that remaining mile-wide nepotism-shaped blind spot. Perhaps it was that her daughter getting knocked up had finally satisfied her desperate need to fix things with some seriously annoying overcompensating. Or maybe it was the CTE she likely had from all the concussions altering her personality as the disease was want to do.
It was just unfortunate that the first shift in her personality was to be a fuck-up of a mayor and matchmaking ditz who whored out her daughter for a cliché happy ending to make up for her failures as a mother rather than going straight to the mostly clear-thinking leader and electable politician whose insular family-minded fault could be countered by adept advisors ...if such people existed in Fairy Tale Land with Belle dead and Robin and Alice having three psychopaths as parents between that didn't bode well for their sanity or usefulness beyond picking up Ruby's Lesbian Awareness torch to maybe get the now Good Queen to finally rekindle whatever thing everyone was sure she'd had with Maleficent, one of the few magical folk wise enough to refuse this invitation in favor of doing anything else, because, let's face it, Charming family events never ended happily.
And so that trite little speech Regina gave about happiness and hope end with applause that went on a bit too long for a singular individual somewhere in the crowd that slowed to a measured clap after the last of the crowd's cacophony had faded.
CLAP *pause* CLAP *pause* CLAP
It was not the clap of someone distracted or hard of hearing, but the intentionally lazy pronouncement of someone who had something to say that was unlikely anyone present would want to hear.
The usual Charming family intruder that drew eye-rolls and muffled groans from the crowd as to why they kept getting duped into following Snow White around by some long-ago oath of fealty that hadn't done anything good for them for more than a few months at a time.
The silently despairing crowd turned, parting to reveal a previously cloaked twenty-something woman with long blonde hair and ice blue eyes and a clear affinity for tight black leather and impracticably high heals.
"Congratulations, Your Majesty," she cooed. "Too bad your reign won't last very long."
"Who are you? And what do you want?" Snow White demanded, her tone brooking no room for theatrics.
"And where do you buy your leathers, luv?" amended Hook in that lascivious way he'd never given up despite being allegedly happily and faithfully married to a woman who did everything he wanted and more while asking for nothing in return, nothing like the model of feminism and independence she once embodied, all to the dismay of many who kept their mouths shut as nothing good came from criticizing a Charming... and even more not good from criticizing a Charming-Jones.
Steely gaze set upon the iconic princess, he stranger first responded, "I like this new and improved personality transplant Snow White. It's almost like you've been cured of whatever strain of useless idiocy you contracted in Neverland. Almost."
Then sidling toward Hook on her approach to the alter, she retorted with a sultry batting of her lashes, "So sad that your wife puts up with your wanton flirtations, Captain. You think you're quite the catch and she thinks she still has a spine, but you're both just washed-up could-have-beens settling for trying to rip-off your in-laws story. Even that dumb bitch who wrote those bondage books did a better job plagiarizing the ditz who wrote about vampires. And at least that vampy teen sacrificed her soul to become an evil, badass baby-maker wifey instead of a prematurely aged knockoff princess with split ends whose about twenty-five years too old for that Molly Ringwald prom dress. Though at least it's more modern than that atrocious Grace Kelly cosplay wedding dress or your Sandra Dee date night. Just think how much better your life could be if you had put up a fight?"
"Stop," Snow interjected, "insulting my family. This day is about-"
"Hope? Yes, I know," the woman agreed, twirling around to flare her cloak, "and so I am gracing you all my presence, one far more interesting than the version of me currently shitting her diaper. Pink just really isn't my color."
Regina's eyes narrowed and she demanded, "You're saying that you're Hope. From the future?"
"Not exactly setting a precedent, am I?" Hope returned with a gesture to Robin and Alice. "As I said, I couldn't let this shindig go down without crashing the party properly to remind you that the way our stories are written celebrations only ever end with tragedies that consist of mass casualties. So good on you, Grandma," she said to Snow, "for gathering up everyone in one room. Better to do them in more quickly than all spread out. Would have been awhile yet before things unraveled in Storybrooke... or, really," she turned back to Regina, "all those other realms you decided for some reason to mash-up together in your quaint little town without asking a single soul if they wanted to go... to spare them separation? Because ...in my history books, seems it was only ever this particular continent in this particular world that had that recurrent problem while people in Oz, Wonderland, and what have you were all doing just fine without being sucked into this family's recurrent magical fiascoes. But way to become a true hero by adopting Grandma's blind self-righteous imposition that she calls sacrifice for the greater good when it's really all just about her own gene pool the occasional pirate that jizzes in it."
"Sounds like," spoke up Prince Henry from the sidelines, "you've got daddy issues. And mommy issues."
"Hard not with a family as fucked up as this one, isn't it?" Hope countered. "You're actually lucky your grandparents are dead, you were never adopted by your step great grandmother, and your birth mother never actually existed thus sticking you in the middle of one giant, festering paradox. Well, maybe not. That paradox is going to bite you in the ass, not-brother of mine. Bite all of us, really, as I was saying. Some sooner than others."
"And, what, you're here to warn us?" asked David.
"No, I'm here to watch after insulting you and gloating about your stupidity for bringing this all upon yourselves, the great iconic heroes who ultimately killed everyone they know and love and all the strangers that foolishly pledged them fealty.. .plus all the people who don't even know your stupid asses. I understand it'll be quite fun, so why go out sitting at home watching Netflix when I can enjoy the carnage and the horrified expressions on your faces before that sweet release of nonexistence? And I do mean nonexistence. Not gonna be any Underworld or Elyssian fields for you all. Shoulda reconsidered letting Rumplestiltskin get the last sacrificial ticket out, really," she told Regina, then over at Wish Realm Hook, "but you should be relieved. Soon you'll be free, that poor tormented soul ripped out of Elyssium and forced into a pre-made copy of my homicidal rapist papa just because Gina there decided to stick her fake double's darkness in her heart and by some dumbass law of Mt. Olympus that required a world created by a damn fool genie become real and all en-souled, thousands of innocents shoved into lives full of cruelly and suffering, acts they never actually committed. That's why your heart is a fucked up mess, Captain. You didn't do any of those terrible things, but being forced to mirror my father you think you did.
"Prince Henry there," Hope continued, "has a got a real villainous streak, though. Makes me think he went through some serious community service in The Underworld for misdeeds before getting parole and then re-ensouled. Pity," she told him, "you couldn't stick with being an asshole. Far more enjoyable a personality than hanging out with my not-brother from the same not-mother.
"And by 'not mother'," Hope amended as she stalked back over to her parents, "I mean this woman who birthed me isn't Emma Swan. She can call herself 'Emma' and think that's her name, think she lived that whole orphan life, but really she's an impostor who doesn't even know it. Who doesn't know who she is, just that it's all very confusing and she hasn't felt like herself - not that she knows who or what that is - since she smooched Captain Hook back to life and fell down a portal. All she knows is that her very existence revolves around his happiness and no matter how utterly ridiculous that is, how utterly undeserving he is, and how abysmally little chemistry they have, she absolutely must reduce herself to this creature that looks like she's a drug addict, anorexic, or terminally ill trying to please him and convince herself that she's exactly who she wants to be, the happiest she could ever hope for... when deep inside there's a darkness crying out to be unleashed, a badass of the most villainous kind meant to be a beautiful antithesis to the badass force for justice she thinks she used to be, her dear twin sister who died inside of her the moment she pushed me out."
"Wait... what?" sputtered Henry while everyone else looked just as befuddled.
"It's simple," sighed Hope, "Those visions you had? They weren't about an either or situation but a you're getting both the good and the bad, situation. More specifically Good and Evil. Which, really, should have been more obvious given your husband had an Evil Twin," she added with a glance at David. "It's an actual magical blood curse condition passed down in afflicted families that someone," she eyed Blue, "tried to cover up with that gypsy charm that ensured both kids were born instead of the bad one's magic murdering the good one in-utero, thus darkening their heart and ensuring they grow up to be the worst sort of villains.
"But for some reason," she addressed the fairy, "you didn't do that with me. You didn't make sure my mother wore that charm. You didn't cast any song spells to try and magically abort me like you tried with my mother. Instead you let me devour my twin, snuff her out of existence before she even had a soul to lose. I wondered why that was, but then I figured it out. You're not on our side. You never were. You're Zeus' little bitch and you wanted me to kill Emma now that she'd served her purpose of defeating your rival because you couldn't stand some uppity mortal cunt copying your magic and having greater immortal aspirations than you, maybe getting Zeus to give her your job instead. But you couldn't keep around the savior who was bound this whole magical axis mundi of the multiverse even subverted in her Evil Twin. Maybe she'd have gotten free. Or maybe she'd have just finding ways to get Mrs. Jones here to sometimes to selfless shit that got in the way of your plans.
"Not that it matters now, does it?" Hope sneered, "because the End of Days was always coming, the cancellation of the whole paradoxical clusterfuck that started piling up when my parents went back in time. I've just decided to speed it up a bit, have my family go out on our terms, not yours... or my terms, anyway. Fuck whatever finale Zeus had planned for his orgy party. That's magic mirror's gone to black before the cliché climax and now we're left with this sad, lazy little rewrite of a wedding into a coronation with a witless new mommy stumbling in to replace the Evil Queen and some sappy double entrandre about hope. Well, your hope is a false one people. So hug your loved one's good-bye, cause your Ultimate Good fucked you over and then your ignorance and selfishness doubled down on Armageddon!"
There was a moment of shock and then everyone looked at the Blue Fairy, but before Snow could demand denial or confirmation of Hope's accusations the sparkly woman miniaturized herself and flew out the window.
"She's telling the truth," Regina deduced and unnerved whispers began around the hall, people pulling loved ones close while some eyed Mrs. Jones with unease.
"It... it can't be," uttered Emma. "I'm... I've always been me... haven't I?"
"No," Hope told her with a regretful look, "you've never been anyone. And thanks to Zelena's spell making you singularly devoted to my father, you weren't even really a mother. I mean, I was a terrible child, but even King George managed to be there for his evil kid. You could have been a wonderfully devoted villain of a mother. We could have ruled the world together, as long as it was going to last at least, but you were always too busy spinning on Papa's dick to give a shit. Which, obviously, is the reason Cousin Henry here ran away and created a world that helped hasten this impending doom."
Looking around, Hope lamented, "I'm the bona fide Evil one here in this family, it's the rest of you are the actual monsters. You're the ones that brought this on with your selfishness and your willful ignorance. And I'm here to tell you that before you cease to exist, you can go fuck yourselves!"
Hope gave her family the finger... and then that finger crumbled and the rest of her followed, turning to a pile of ash on the floor.
"What the...?" began David.
"ELLA!" Henry suddenly cried out as his wife was the next to fall.
Regina threw magic to try stopping it from spreading while Not-Really-Emma wailed as the baby in her arms crumbled to dust. Lucy vanished next, falling through Henry's arms to join the piles of dust that were Ella and Baby Hope.
Soon Hook was gone too, his wife holding his hook and weeping before it too was dust, only the dislodged pacifier remaining bouncing on the floor. She dropped to her knees to retrieve it but upon the impact began herself to shatter.
"Emma!" David shouted, lunging forward only for his daughter to end up a pile of ashes scattered over his boots.
"Not really Emma apparently," corrected Grumpy with a shrug which seemed to trigger his own demise. "I knew I should've sat this one out," he managed before he was gone, his brothers following one by one.
"No!" wailed Zelena has her daughter from two timelines simultaneously vaporized followed by Alice and her father.
"Well, you didn't really deserve a kid," said Archie. "Let's face it, you're a psychopath who should be locked up and sterilized." He got a few scandalized looks and shrugged. "What? If we're all about to die, then I'm tied of being the nice doctor who listens and understands. Most of you are selfish assholes who don't even listen to me. I need therapy from giving all you narcissistic shitheads thera-"
Archie never got to finish that long bottled-up rant.
"Snow!" David gasped, pulling her into a kiss. As their lips smashed together he broke apart and she followed before he'd completely disintegrated, their ashy bits mixed together on the alter where they'd married.
All around the audience was falling apart, some screaming and shouting, but most seemingly resigned to their fates after numerous apocalypses.
"Henry," Regina gasped, pulling him into her embrace...
Only for Henry to move right through his adoptive mother as she too became ash, the last to fall.
When the dust cloud cleared, Henry was left alone in the beautifully lit hall surrounded by a gritty swirls of former people that resembled one of those Tibetan monk sand drawings after it was wiped into an unrecognizable mess.
"This can't be happening," he croaked out. "This has to be a nightmare."
"Think of it as a new beginning," a new voice interrupted and Henry startled, turning toward a humanoid creature, female and covered in feathers and scales with fingernails that resembled talons curled around a large golden sword. She approached as the walls of the hall began to crumble away revealing nothingness beyond. "It'll keep you sane during what's to come."
"What's happening?" Henry rasped out. "Who are you?"
"I am called Alecto," answered the raptor-woman, "and I was dispatched by Hera to spare you the fate of nonexistence in order to help repair the original realms."
As the darkness closed in, Alecto wrapped her other taloned hand around Henry's wrist and they were instantly elsewhere, standing in Storybrooke's cemetery... but not its present cemetery for Henry found his father's grave with the pile of dirt still fresh, a wilting rose atop the polished granite.
"This is years ago."
"We need time to prepare, to set the board in our favor as the End of Days approaches. Hope accelerated it, brought it back in time, so we had to go back in time ourselves... which will also accelerate the process, but there was no other way. A cascade failure has become from the paradoxes that Zelena started, that your adoptive mother compounded when she made the Wish Realm into a real, full multiverse of its own... when you created another Enchanted Forest as a cure for your loneliness."
"I... wait... what?" Henry sputtered.
"You created that world, Henry, and everyone in it," Alecto told him. "Your desperate need to find a place to belong that would also satisfy your grandparent's notion of love and happiness created an entire world - and ripped from Heaven souls to populate it. The curse Gothel put you all under was nothing, really, compared to the continual torment your wife was in from the moment she came into existence, a fully formed adult... spawned from some subconscious mommy issues you clearly doubled-down on after Violet dumped you. Like Hope, that Ella never should have been. Her life on a deep level was suffering. Your creating her was selfish just as your aunt creating Hope was selfish... just as, really, your other mother adopting you was selfish. Your family has been marked more by acts of selfishness than selflessness... but Zeus did make his magical mortals in his image.
"That is an image that must be shattered," Alecto continued. "And the first step in that is to let the End come, let the worlds not meant to exist be purged, the trapped souls freed and returned to Elyssium - which has become essentially a ghost afterlife town since your family kept yanking souls out of their happy endings for your happy beginnings. Only then can the timeline that Zelena, with the help of your aunt and Hook, destroyed be pieced back together, her darkness purged from what is rebuilt. It will never be what it was, what your mother will remember, carry in her heart, but it can be much less what her sister made it. And that is good for everyone... save Zeus, of course. Hera means to overthrow him."
Henry swallowed thickly. "So... my mom... she really died?"
"She did. She fought, mostly unaware, to funnel her goodness, her magic, through her sister. In truth, she would have been killed by Gideon if it wasn't for her sister wielding her magic, thus creating a loophole. But that would have been a kinder death, to have lived those final years of her life, to have raised you, to have known her parents and her brother and then sacrificed herself so that you could all be happy. But was altered. Just as your father's fate was altered. Zeus has had too many selfish minions like Blue pulling your strings. Or he just intercedes on his own like sending Killian Jones back to life. Zeus is the founder and president of the Murderous, Raping, Misogynist Fuckboy Club for Narcissistic Douchebags, so he doesn't pass up opportunities to skirt the rules for them while punishing anyone who seeks free will and shows true empathy. He let his own brother kidnap and threaten to rape his own daughter just so he could show how superior he was to Hades by not giving a shit about anything macho his little brother did. Hera had to help Persephone's mother rescue her. Really, Hades was far better suited to rule Mt. Olympus if it had to be an immortal with a dick, but his bully of a big brother continually smited him for not being cruel enough, for being too attached to the mortal souls he watched over, helped purify their souls to find their way into Elyssium - where even could not go.
"The Olympian family," said Alecto, "is even more fucked up than yours. And that's saying something. But if the Gods can be neutered by the Goddesses and the few Gods who aren't loyal to Zeus, then this ending that Zeus will let happen so he can just start over fresh can be used to free all the worlds from his servitude and the endlessly unavoidable cliché obstacles and rewards, give magical mortals true free will and the ability to live unhindered by archaic literary tropes. There will be no Authors, no Books. Souls will not be judged by petty Gods. We may have created you to be our entertainment, but does that mean you do not deserve to be free, to find your own happiness. Zeus does not see that, but Hera does. And you can help make that happen, Henry Daniel Mills. If you are willing."
"If the alternative is not existing, I don't have much of a choice, do I?" Henry quipped as a column of light burst into the sky.
"But you will," Alecto stated. "The Henry Mills who continues on after you are gone, after you have fulfilled your part in this will have many choices open to him. He will be freed of the burden of that pen. And he will have the love and support of two mothers, no lecherous stepfather, no evil sister, no contrived marriage and squandered dreams."
Henry squeezed his eyes shut in pain and Alecto laid a scaly hand on his shoulder, telling him, "Hold dear the happy memories to sustain you, but do not mourn them. They are free, restored to the peace from which they were taken, and though they know not that they were once, in a twisted reality, mother and daughter, they are happy and given back the connections, the memories of the lives that earned them peace. The same is true of Hope, Alice, that kinder Hook who was, in his past life, a far better man than your step grandfather. They are all happier now. And your family... what they became no longer exists. What they are now can be changed to something better."
"And my father?" Henry asked as the light vanished and the world seemed to ripple, not visibly and yet Henry could feel it, that an entire universe had been destroyed and they'd transplanted into a different version of it, one that felt... darker.
"Grieve him," Alecto told him. "You owe yourself that. You owe your mother that, for she cannot. Her sister has now sealed her fate, imprisoned until she can be set free to help heal the timeline. And so your own has been sealed to wait here, in this time, for instruction."
Alecto sheathed her sword and explained, "You will be given instructions dead drops here and this," she handed him a feather from her crest, "will alert you went to come. Blend in with the Second Curse immigrants. Try to find some purpose to fill the space between. Come to terms with your end to give yourself a new beginning. The Final Battle will not be easy. And there is never peace eternal in any mortal world. But you can give this small corner of this world a fighting chance."
With that, Alecto threw a magic bean, creating a spinning vertical vortex. "I don't know about you," she said, "but I suspect Anton was binging Marvel movies when he was experimenting with this new strain of magic bean. Probably too much to hope Benadict Cumberbatch wearing a sexy cape is on the other side..."
Henry watched as Hera's agent jumped through the portal and it closed up to nothing, restoring the view of his father's fresh grave.
Picking up the wilted rose from atop the headstone, Henry's stomach tied itself in additional knots. His father was newly dead again. His mother was now trapped in some mental hellscape, fighting a losing battle to regain control - if she was even aware what was going on. His grandfather would be marginalized to the point of doing terrible things, some for good reasons and for lack of anyone willing to help him find another way. His adoptive mother would have a sordid love affair that involved her own sister who was also his father's murderer and an entire world would be created and made real, complete with doubles of his grandparents whose heart she would crush before unknowingly making it real, giving it a past and future and its inhabitants' actions having consequences for everyone. And, of course, his aunt that everyone thought was his mother would become the Dark One, marry his step grandfather, and apparently almost die that kept his mother from actually dying but instead she just suffered a worse death... a death he had to prevent somehow.
It really was a clusterfuck.
Rain began to fall, fat droplets splashing on the gravestones in the cemetery he honestly had never visited again after placing that flower and Henry spoke to the generic polished granite with its cheap epitaph that didn't even include "father" with a heavy heart.
"You and Mom wanted better than what you got in life for me," he lamented, "and I let you down. That bird lady's right. I wasted my potential. I had all kinds of dreams, aspirations that I gave up when I got that pen, when everyone in this family besides Mom - Regina - kept pressuring me into their fairytale idea of how my life should go, like their past had to determine my future. I bought into that and I didn't question it until I was cursed, memory-less, and with nothing but a failed book to show for putting my dreams on paper. The story was bad. It was literally all wrong, apparently, a bunch of compounded mistakes that Zeus made or let happen just for kicks, not caring if the end result was everything ending, seems because he's a thousands of years old prick who could just start over with new mortal playthings."
Henry held the dying rose tighter, felt the thorns dig into his palm and draw blood.
"I'm no one's plaything anymore," he declared. "I'm going to help make things right for everyone."
The rain shower passed as the late afternoon began a swift transition into the darkness of Maine's early spring evening. Just a few miles away his uncle was being named for his dead father, the woman everyone thought was his mother would soon be making out with his step-grandfather like the world was ending now... and his younger self would be enduring his grandmother's idiotic tittering over their romance while having no with a 21st century clue about puberty and romance to talk to so he'd end up dating a very confused Lesbian from Camelot.
"Maybe I could get a cat," Henry considered, thinking aloud to himself as he returned the rose to the gravestone, "Mom did say that she was shitting Aunt Zelena about Lily's dad being Zoro in a bet with Maleficent, so maybe I was right that he's also Puss in Boots who was cursed to be that alley cat that terrifies Smee and leaves opossum heads on Granny's doorstep..."
AN: Cats are nasty sometimes. Good riddance to OUAT!